VXLAN is hot. We constantly hear about VXLAN at conferences, in product announcements, blog posts, and most importantly, we hear about it from our customers.

VXLAN exciting technology that’s been integrated into a number of product offerings from networking and cloud vendors. OpenStack® supports VXLAN via a set of Neutron plugins, and Metacloud OpenStack® has supported VXLAN for a few releases already.

One of the challenges with deploying and scaling VXLAN has been the MAC-to-VTEP learning and BUM (Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, Multicast) packet flooding. The VXLAN spec uses a simple multicast solution to solve this problem. Multicast has its own set of scaling challenges, and reliable multicast routing between network segments isn’t always available. The majority of vendors who have VXLAN support have attempted to solve this problem by implementing their own form of learning and flooding. Some of these solutions work well, but all of them require you to operate in a homogenous network environment or pay expensive per CPU or per VM licensing fees.

Until today…

Metacloud, in partnership with our friends at Cumulus Networks®, have been working together on a solution to these problems for the past year. Starting today, VXFLD is open source and freely Continue reading